The Wizarding World Gets PoE

Holiday Greetings from PoE Texas!  

We’ve got an unusual blog for you with a holiday theme: magic wands using Power Over Ethernet.  I know, it’s a little odd for a PoE company to do something magical.  But a few months ago my 5 year-old daughter turned her big brown eyes on me asking for a Harry Potter themed birthday party.  Then my wife and I started the “ well you know we could . . .” conversations, and I volunteered to make a magic wand adventure where my daughter could use a real wands to make magic.  

So I pulled out my trusty Arduino and started brainstorming.  We came up with three well known charms we could recreate: levitating a feather (wingardium leviosa), opening a box (alohomora), and turning on a light (lumos).  Since this birthday party would go for a couple hours and needed reliable we could use PoE to power the Arduino’s with a minimum of cables and outlets.  Six months later I found myself swinging a homemade wand around shouting pseudo-latin in front of a packed house of three to ten year-olds - and a fair number of parents if I’m being honest.

What a fun project using our Power Over Ethernet products in this unconventional way to power Arduino controllers and, frankly, bring a little magic into my daughter’s life.